With Amazon S3 celebrating its sixteenth birthday this year, it's easy to forget just how revolutionary it was at its release. S3's buckets and objects were profoundly different from the directories and files that developers had been manipulating through filesystem APIs. What drove this innovation, and how does cloud object storage actually work? In this session, Pat Patterson, Chief Developer Evangelist at Backblaze, will trace the evolution of cloud object storage, explain the trade-offs in implementing secure, reliable, scalable online data storage, and give a detailed technical explanation of Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage’s implementation.